The Art of Public Speaking | Page 7

enjoy here. The dwarfed
oak on the rocky hillside is natural, but a poor thing compared with the
beautiful tree found in the rich, moist bottom lands. Be natural--but
improve your natural gifts until you have approached the ideal, for we
must strive after idealized nature, in fruit, tree, and speech.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES.
1. What are the causes of monotony?
2. Cite some instances in nature.
3. Cite instances in man's daily life.
4. Describe some of the effects of monotony in both cases.
5. Read aloud some speech without paying particular attention to its
meaning or force.
6. Now repeat it after you have thoroughly assimilated its matter and
spirit. What difference do you notice in its rendition?
7. Why is monotony one of the worst as well as one of the most
common faults of speakers?
CHAPTER III
EFFICIENCY THROUGH EMPHASIS AND SUBORDINATION
In a word, the principle of emphasis...is followed best, not by
remembering particular rules, but by being full of a particular feeling.
--C.S. BALDWIN, Writing and Speaking.
The gun that scatters too much does not bag the birds. The same
principle applies to speech. The speaker that fires his force and
emphasis at random into a sentence will not get results. Not every word

is of special importance--therefore only certain words demand
emphasis.
You say MassaCHUsetts and MinneAPolis, you do not emphasize each
syllable alike, but hit the accented syllable with force and hurry over
the unimportant ones. Now why do you not apply this principle in
speaking a sentence? To some extent you do, in ordinary speech; but do
you in public discourse? It is there that monotony caused by lack of
emphasis is so painfully apparent.
So far as emphasis is concerned, you may consider the average
sentence as just one big word, with the important word as the accented
syllable. Note the following:
"Destiny is not a matter of chance. It is a matter of choice."
You might as well say MASS-A-CHU-SETTS, emphasizing every
syllable equally, as to lay equal stress on each word in the foregoing
sentences.
Speak it aloud and see. Of course you will want to emphasize destiny,
for it is the principal idea in your declaration, and you will put some
emphasis on not, else your hearers may think you are affirming that
destiny is a matter of chance. By all means you must emphasize chance,
for it is one of the two big ideas in the statement.
Another reason why chance takes emphasis is that it is contrasted with
choice in the next sentence. Obviously, the author has contrasted these
ideas purposely, so that they might be more emphatic, and here we see
that contrast is one of the very first devices to gain emphasis.
As a public speaker you can assist this emphasis of contrast with your
voice. If you say, "My horse is not black," what color immediately
comes into mind? White, naturally, for that is the opposite of black. If
you wish to bring out the thought that destiny is a matter of choice, you
can do so more effectively by first saying that "DESTINY is NOT a
matter of CHANCE." Is not the color of the horse impressed upon us
more emphatically when you say, "My horse is NOT BLACK. He is

WHITE" than it would be by hearing you assert merely that your horse
is white?
In the second sentence of the statement there is only one important
word--choice. It is the one word that positively defines the quality of
the subject being discussed, and the author of those lines desired to
bring it out emphatically, as he has shown by contrasting it with
another idea. These lines, then, would read like this:
"DESTINY is NOT a matter of CHANCE. It is a matter of CHOICE."
Now read this over, striking the words in capitals with a great deal of
force.
In almost every sentence there are a few MOUNTAIN PEAK WORDS
that represent the big, important ideas. When you pick up the evening
paper you can tell at a glance which are the important news articles.
Thanks to the editor, he does not tell about a "hold up" in Hong Kong
in the same sized type as he uses to report the death of five firemen in
your home city. Size of type is his device to show emphasis in bold
relief. He brings out sometimes even in red headlines the striking news
of the day.
It would be a boon to speech-making if speakers would conserve the
attention of their audiences in the same way and emphasize only the
words representing the important ideas. The average speaker will
deliver the foregoing line on destiny with about the same amount of
emphasis on each word. Instead of saying, "It is a matter